Thursday 27 March 2014

Patch Delivery System v0.3

A huge update in this release!

The first big difference is that now instead of calling opatch.bat to apply the patches, I actually invoke the Java program directly. This means that the error codes can be checked more reliably and that the program logic actually works correctly now - opatch.bat file did weird things to the script execution! This now means that PDS will detect automatically if a patch did not apply correctly and prompt to re-apply only in case of errors. You can also attempt to re-apply the patch as many times as you want - previously you only got 2 chances!

To facilitate the above change I had to make a lot of changes to the setEnv.bat file and introduce a new file: setEnvOPatch.bat. These 2 files pull in all the environment variables required to run OPatch without going through opatch.bat. setEnv.bat also includes more checking of variables, more error checking and some new routines for detecting the location of the JRE\JDK.

I have also added more error checking in general to all of the scripts and tried to clean up the output of the scripts, to make it look a little better on the screen.

I have now included example configuration files for a machine called "WINKER". This is to help with creating your own config files.

I additionally have also created a README.txt file - so you should be able to figure out what the heck you are supposed to do with this thing a bit easier now!

For the next version I will have to finally go through the scripts and sort out the names of all my GOTOs - they are not very descriptive right now and need to be sorted out. I also should give some more meaningful comments, to make things a little easier to figure out if you wanted to delve into the code.

I am not sure where to take the scripts next after that. It might be nice to have a GUI tool to show the success or failure of each patch operation, creating a nice report of how the patching went or something like that. The problem is that you can't really fully automate EPM and OBIEE patching because they usually require some manual pre and post patching steps, such as copying files, deleting folders or redeploying components to WebLogic.

Please let me know if you use these scripts, have scripts of your own, have ideas on how to improve them or wish to report any bugs.

You can download version 0.3 of PDS here.

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